Communication and Teamwork

James Shiplet-Teamwork and Communication

Healthcare providers work in a multifaceted environment. The care of patients in critical care areas, such as intensive care units, emergency departments, surgery, and labor and delivery units, require the constant involvement from individuals with varying professional backgrounds and education. Physicians, nurses, surgeons, respiratory therapists, pharmacist, technicians etc. need to work with each other to deliver expert care in the safest method possible. Although, when these highly qualified professionals learn their skills in their formative education years, scarcely any attention is spent on roles of other members of the patient care team.  And, all too often they don’t have a clear understanding of each other’s roles and responsibilities as part of the healthcare team.  The Institutes of Medicine released their sentinel report in 2000, “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System” and soon after that the Joint Commission on Accreditation for Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) began advocating team training.  What I liked about this article is it addresses the human error dilemma by using the Crew Resource Management (CRM) method of team training which was taken from the airliner industry, the SBAR method of giving critical concise information to physicians about their patients when they are in a crisis.  CRM education programs encompass team training sessions, simulations, after action debriefings, and measurements of the patient care teams’ performance.  SBAR stands for situation (what happened), background (a short review of the patient), assessment (what you think the problem is) and recommendation (the treatment that you think the patient needs to get better).  With these two items alone many adverse patient incidents can be avoided.

References

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1765783/pdf/v013p00i85.pdf